Professor griefs gamers, feigns surprise at reaction | Hacker News Reader

Professor griefs gamers, feigns surprise at reaction

itworld.com

54 pointsabennett60 comments

I'm with the professor on this one. If you can't play-act like a villain, or a villainous hero, in a game about heroes and villains, then what the hell is the fantasy world of gaming giving other than all the worst weaknesses and faults of the real world?

Have any of the detractors stopped to think that perhaps their sense of community and socializing isn't what all gamers want? Societies values are not always intrinsically good. The fantasy world of gaming gives a person the chance to transcend normal forces and values, within the rules of the given fantasy world.

It is entirely fitting that this experiment was done in a world of heroes and villains. The majority want to claim a moral prerogative to insist on status quo, just like in the real world, when far fewer of the foundational reasons for the status quo exist. Your real world nor fantasy world freedoms, life, limb, rights are not affected by a rule-abiding player who entered a fantasy world to play out their fantasy of heroes and villains. The genuine and rule-abiding fantasy players rights are impinged by the majority rule.

A summary of wrongs here, (1) death threats conducted in the real world against a player who played the intended fantasy in the fantasy world (2) support by the majority of enforcing real world rules as if they had the same weight and imperative in the game world which was being used by design (3) Editorializing in the title of this post, and not least (4) a direct accusation of dishonesty which constitutes a personal attack in the title of this post.

If we transcend mob rule and the establishment for a moment, step into the realm of ethics and what is truth, necessary and unnecessary social norms and rules versus individual rights, we find a sad sad tale of the majority wanting to forcing their way on every individual in an mis-balanced sense of societies rights and needs.

Kill my karma, if you must, establishment supporters, but it's the professor, not the establishment, who has my support.

I don't think you understood the situation. It sounds to me like he was killing his own teammates -- who literally couldn't attack/fight his character -- using glitches/bugs. He just wasn't roleplaying a villain.

Normally when a villain tries to kill you, you can at least fight him. He was killing people for which "PvP mode was not enabled".

I read that whole thing, and I'll re-read it, but I really didn't hear at all that he was using glitches and bugs. In fact, the rules and rule-abiding were an important component of the study.

Other users were using an area designed for free combat as a social zone. Perhaps the designers should have created a safe social zone, if that was such a popular thing to have.

> Rather than fighting other players directly, he used a special ability to teleport them in front of a computer-controlled firing squad, which would immediately kill them.

He's doing that because he can't attack them. And they can't attack him either. it says:

> the victim has no chance to retaliate

They mean literally. If he was just attacking people who could attack him, in a zone where PvP is enabled, it wouldn't be called griefing.

Also someone in comments below says they have patched this stuff now. Legitimate behaviors don't get patched.

Actually, he was killing villains, not heroes. He was on the heroes team, therefore technically he was not killing his teammates.

Having said that, however, he did not engage villains in combat, but rather teleport them to a kill zone. That's unethical, for sure. Had he simply engaged villains, I'd see nothing wrong with that. If other players don't want to kill villains, even if that's their job as heroes, that's their problem.

From reading the earlier articles, I believe the player in question was --

* Going to PvP-specific areas only (i.e. areas where 'hero' player characters are meant to fight 'villain' player characters)

* Using 'in-character' communication to indicate he wanted to fight villains, like heroes in that area supposedly do. His character was a hero.

* Using a teleport power to move some nearby villain player characters near non-player-characters, who would then kill the villains.

* Subsequently using 'in-character' communication to cheer about having killed villains.

* This was a major issue because many, many players in those player-vs-player (hero vs villain) areas instead would use the areas for 'farming,' i.e. trying to get experience points (or in-character currency) by killing non-player-characters instead.

* The 'written vs. unwritten rules' that he broke were specifically the customs of what players were actually doing in those areas (farming) vs what the game designers had intended them to do (kill each other).

That conflict between the intended purpose of a game's aspects and how others reacted to it being used that way is the main focus of that professor's article. He seemed to expect for people to suspend their disbelief and remain fully in-character, i.e. following the game's ostensible in-character limitations.

Thanks for the summary!

And, ah yes, farming! I think I love a player who disrupts that disgustingly boring cycle that ruins the interest in most online worlds. No wonder they hated him, he disrupted their farming!

I read the actual report from the professor prepublication, and that is not at all how I understand it.

Please correct me if I am misunderstanding, but he was killing "Villains" as a "Hero" character, at least as his primary personna. He did use "alts" for further testing and just to enjoy the game as well. He did not use glitches or bugs. He did exploit the rules to their fullest, but in most truly competitive games that is expected.

He did kill "Villains" that were not looking for PVP, but he only did so in zones that were designed (or at least had the stated purpose) of being designated PVP areas. I do not play "City of Heroes" or any other MMORPG currently but my understanding from his description of the zone is that at least by the stated purpose anyone in those zones should expected to be attacked.

As I understand it, he was accurately roleplaying a "Hero", albiet a ruthless one.

That's how I read it. If I were a real superhero, with real teleportation abilities, I'd be teleporting everything into something incredibly lethal, too. The NPCs were available in CoH; in real life, I have deep mineshafts. Heck, I'd probably _create_ something incredibly lethal just to have something to teleport things into.

Looking at it from a storyline point of view, it's really cool. The city is overrun by villians, while the nominal "heroes" of the city rest on their laurels, or cower in their mansions. Then, from nowhere, a true hero: Twixt! The villians try everything they can, including banding together en-masse, but are unable to topple the City's Savior! Biff! Pow! Zap!

"It sounds to me like he was killing his own teammates... He was killing people for which "PvP mode was not enabled"."

I don't think that's right. The original nola.com article (linked to in this one) says: "Eventually, according to the game's design, the players -- who can choose to play as either heroes or villains -- gain access into an area where they should battle each other. The battles are designed to distinguish the most skilled players."

So he plays PvP.

Also, the point of the game (or at least its original concept) was that you have Heroes and Villains and the two factions fight each other. He played as a Hero and fought Villains. As you're supposed to.

The issue is that most players don't want to do that, so instead Heroes become friends with Villains, team up and mix socially.

When this guy comes along and griefs Villains (using underhanded but not illegal methods) he's playing by the rules of the game but not by the social contract of its inhabitants. Their reaction is what makes it interesting.

The way I see it, he was clearly exploiting game mechanics to grief other players. He was using a specific ability, one that teleports players, to teleport them in front of what appears to be an unkillable robot that instantly kills everything. After he was done with that, he "innocently" taunts them. I'm pretty shocked that NCSoft didn't do anything about this. In other MMOs, that person would've been banned a long, long time ago. I played CoH for a bit, and I think it's still one of the nicest, casual MMO communities around, hell, one of the nicest, casual gaming communities around. This guy walked around a virtual community, disrupting it on purpose just for an experiment. Imagine coming home after a pretty long day of college/work, log on to play, only to have someone permanently teleport you to death, and then taunt you.

It certainly seems like they had every opportunity to ban him, but chose not to, which implies that it's not quite as simple as the griefer explanation.

But they did fix the loophole, which means they weren't supporting what he was doing, and didn't want other people to do it. I'm not familiar with their banning policy, but like I said, trying any cute tricks like that in other MMO communities can certainly get you banned.

You can rationalize his behavior however you like, but it's not socially acceptable to purposefully ruin people's time in a game designed to be fun.

The majority is clearly right to enforce their rules in this instance, since playing by the professor's rules ("anything goes") would make the game not at all fun.

I'm not familiar with City of Heroes.

According to the article, all the action took place in an area where heroes and villains are supposed to be dueling each other, but the social norm was to not do that.

If that really is the case, why get mad at a guy who's fighting villains in an area that's all about heroes and villains fighting? Or was that aspect misrepresented in the article?

I don't have an opinion; I'm asking questions because I don't have any direct experience in the game.

No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules. The majority can abide by the rules or they can leave. Voting with your wallet is the most powerful way of voting, after all.

If the rules in PvP area specify PvP battles and someone wants to battle that way, that's what they're allowed to do. If he did something illegal, it's up to the game designers to correct that. If he did something unethical, like teleporting a villain to a kill zone, he may be disliked.

At no point, though, should he be threatened with bodily harm or being bullied by the "majority". If they had ignored him and/or engaged him in battle, he'd have no data for his study.

> "No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules."

Is that an edict handed down from on high? The majority has the power to enforce rules (they can impose social consequences on rule-breakers) and they usually have a good deal of wisdom about what rules are worth enforcing. They clearly do enforce them, and who says they shouldn't?

Who says they should, especially when the "enforcing" can be distilled down to plain old bullying and threatening? If I were the game designer, those ones would be the first to go and then maybe the professor.

Well, I support giving players better tools; for example, being able to bar the professor's character from the zone by player vote. However, without that, shaming is about the best one can do.

I think the fundamental reason that they should is that players are the ones playing the game the most, and in my experience, the most active players usually have a more accurate understanding of what's fun and what's fair than the game designers.

I don't condone death threats; bad behavior comes in all flavors.

"Is that an edict handed down from on high?"

No. Any decent multiplayer game is designed and, when necessary, updated to prevent or permit certain actions.

Responding to the two points above:

- It sounds like most people in the zone wanted to fight, they just didn't want people to use the professor's specific tactics, which is eminently reasonable, since the professor's tactics were so powerful as to make fighting no fun.

- The game designers do not make the rules in a multiplayer game. They provide an environment, and they might have rules in mind when they do it, but the players make the rules and define their own limits and conditions for victory and defeat. To say that you're playing "by the rules" because what you're doing is possible in the game is absurd. It's akin to beating people up on the street and insisting that you're not doing anything wrong since you aren't breaking the laws of physics, and God has not struck you down with lightning. In both instances, you will suffer the consequences for your antisocial actions.

"The game designers do not make the rules in a multiplayer game."

Wha? Of course they do. All video games (including MMORPGs) are highly controlled environments and good game designers account for different playing styles.

The game designers write the laws of physics, the players write the Code of Hammurabi.

I think a great example of this comes from Eve-Online: There are no friendly fire restrictions, but people generally agree that shooting your teammate is a bad thing, so it's not generally done. However there are some corporations that have a different culture, and your ship is destroyed by your commander to set an example to keep the fleet in line.

This is one of the main reasons I find Eve interesting; The single shard sandbox style brings out a much more interesting social dynamic. The only game I know of that has a daily updated map of player territories, here's a time lapse of almost 2 years of player warefare, ending with the destruction of one of the in game superpowers, in 59sec: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MuyMlT9hY

Just out of curiosity - have you ever played any MMORPGs?

Yes, mostly FFXI

It's not up to you to decide how people should enjoy a game, is it? If the majority of the players feel that someone's behavior is impacting their enjoyment then arguably you are in the wrong, as after all, people sign on to the game to have fun, and being killed without defense is probably not fun to most people. So, whether it was explicitly allowed by some written rules somewhere, arguably his behavior was counterproductive to the aims of the customers and I'm surprised the company let him get away with it as long as he did.

In one MMO game I've played, they had very strict rules about this sort of behavior. Essentially, their position was that "if you, through a bug or glitch or undocumented function find yourself being able to do things that you arguably should have figured out was not intended, and you take advantage of this in the game, you are subject to a lifetime ban without warning."

They signed up to play heroes vs villains. That's what they got. They wanted to farm experience points and socialize, but it was harder than they wanted it to be because someone else was following the rules and using their own skills to defeat them.

The rules of the game, in this case, are essentially the bill of rights, protecting the minority from the majority. The majority appealed and got some changes to the rules, but the fundamentals mostly stayed the same, and individual players can continue playing as the professor did, if they wish, regardless of the desire of other players to conduct boring activities like build up points by killing NPCs.

Perhaps the people who want to do this safely should petition the developer for some NPC-killing only zone. Oh, but then the game would really be ruined. LOL, there's got to be some danger to simply building up points in a game like this.

I really wish more people would question the damage being done by this type of common but fantasy-killing majority behavior to the original intent and storyline in MMO games.

If you play a PvP game and/or go into a PvP zone, expect PvP. If you keep getting beat by someone who is playing by the rules, then get better. If there's still no way for you to beat them, then it's on the game developers to balance the game. It's that simple.

But it wasn't PvP. The professor took advantage of the invincible NPCs at the ends of the area to kill the other players.

If he had simply been a bully, picking on weaker players, the situation would have been different. The professor was exploiting a loophole in the structure of the game provoke a reaction from other players.

ORLY? From the original article:

gain access into an area where they should battle each other. The battles are designed to distinguish the most skilled players.

and

Myers [..] quickly learned that players ignored the area's stated purpose. Heroes chatted peacefully with villains in the combat zone.

He broke a social contract, not a game play mechanic.

It's like fat people walking down the middle of a narrow hallway; there is not explicit rule that prohibits that. But they are still breaking implicit rules which pisses people off.

PS: People don’t clearly separate games from real life. If you follow to closely to an avatar in an MMO for to low it will also bug people.

The means by which Myers was winning did nothing to establish himself as a skilled player. People were not using his strategy precisely because it required no skill. Myers was not using the area as intended but rather abusing a loophole (that was later closed by the game admins).

I suppose you are of the opinion that screwing over other people IRL also is all right, as long as it's legal? I mean, if it wasn't meant to be done, then it would be illegal, right?

I'm not with either side. One key thing about MMOs is that people are an integral part of the system. We can't just disregard them and pretend that only the rules written in source code are valid, especially when the ultimate goal is to provide a social entertainment environment.

I generally consider any form of disruption bad since it's just plain bad manners. But with that being said, I don't think that mob rules are good for a community either. I was a member of a game forum a while back that had interesting off-topic sections (art, news, etc), but the forum would often become a dramafest and focus solely on, say, in-forum "punishment" for in-game cheaters, effectively making all the interesting sections dry up.

I have this (rather informal) theory that rules of majority are usually driven by the xkcd.org/386 effect, i.e. in the collective mind, the members are defending a good cause (whether it really is a good cause or not is another story). One could argue that maybe the lone rebel is right, but if the definitions of "right" are subjective to begin with, then does it make sense to take sides?

Definitions of right are not subjective. That's moral relativism. It's just hard to find what right, but the majority isn't necessarily right.

Sure, if you're talking about equations. In social contexts, however, being "right" doesn't usually translate to mathematical proofs. You get what I meant.

It is moral relativism, but what of it? Unless you take it on blind faith there's no real appeal to moral absolutism, either.

Having played City of Heroes and knowing what's going on here, you're completely off base. The CoH PvP zones have special drones protecting the base, to give people breathing room. This professor was repeatedly teleporting people into them, an act which gave him no reward whatsoever and which (at least for a while) penalized the person involved (drone kills would give you XP debt). Neither of these properties hold during normal, legitimate, PvP play.

RPing a villain is fine. Acting like an asshole makes you a pariah. Surprised?

Thank you for completely clarifying the situation. This is what I was talking about. He didn't battle the villains outright and beating them, what he was doing WAS unethical.

This makes me wonder why the game admins did not step in and stop him from antagonizing the community like this. It wasn't normal play behaviour.

It doesn't excuse the threatening, but at least puts it into proper context.

I do not play City of Heroes, however if you read his research paper and his comments, he did those things to remove those players as obstacles in order to complete the objective of the zone (capturing 6 towers as I understand).

Since I do not play please let me know if I misunderstand, but it sounds like he was taking a perfectly legitimate avenue to his ultimate goal of capturing those 6 towers and winning the zone.

The towers are, by design, nowhere close to any of the key positions. No one close enough to be teleported into the towers (the power has a range limit) is in any way threatening the nominal goals of the zone.

I'm not sure why they didn't ban him, honestly. I had gathered that this type of sociopathy was considered griefing by the developers and grounds for temporary or permanent bans.

Is it illegal to walk down the street with super soaker spraying everyone who walks by? Probably not technically, but you can bet people would be pissed, you might get beaten up, and likely a cop would attempt to cite you with something. Is the fact that people don't like to get squirted with water part of the tyranny of the majority?

You can philosophize all you want about bigger issues. Lord knows thousands of 4chan'ers are willing to expound upon the rights of trolls ad nauseam. However the simple fact that you're ignoring is this guy went into a game with the express goal of pissing people off, and acted surprised and fascinated by this reaction. I don't give 2 craps about online games, or about whether he has "the right" to do it (of course he has the right to be an asshole just as people in the real world do), the bottom line this guy is a hack--this research is utterly pointless and obvious.

Never mind that the side walk is not designated as a place to spray people with super soakers?

This analogy is flawed.

However, that doesn't undermine your later argument as far as I can tell.

The PvP area is not designated as a place to use a flaw in the game design to insta-kill people.

I think you could summarize this article as "Gamer dislikes griefers, thinks gaming is serious business". It sounds like it was partially on the game designers to limit this griefing activity and make this character able to be killed. The professor's purpose was to study this community and in doing so he put it under stress and watched it react. I think this is valid research given that no one was actually hurt-just annoyed.

It seems like this guy should be more upset with the developers who did nothing (that's cited in the article) to stop this.

It may be a valid and interesting result, but I don't think it was ethically collected. I'd love to hear how these human subjects were briefed or compensated for this study. It's pretty clear the professor was subjecting them to unexpected emotional stress without their consent.

It may also be valid and interesting to find out what happens if you flip people off in traffic, or pay for your restaurant bill in pennies, or taunt preschoolers when you beat them in a game, but it doesn't mean it's ethical to just go out and do it, even if there's nothing explicitly saying it's illegal.

At least at the UC, I suspect this sort of research would require human subjects approval, just like if you want to interview random people or put them through some form of test. You can't just harass people who have not agreed to it in the name of "research" anymore in a MMORP than you can on the street.

I think someone at Loyola needs to think about ethical guidelines for research here.

This summed up exactly what I thought of the original article. I have to wonder what the result of this will be on his credibility as a professor and how it will reflect on Loyola University in the long run.

Reporting on common sense that is akin to running into a lion den and hitting one with a stick only to result in a mauling should not be newsworthy, let alone require the writing of a book.

Edit -> Link to the original article in case you missed it. http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university...

Reiterating common sense is not scholarship, systematically measuring it is.

Link to the discussion on HN about the original article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690551

The original study is entirely valid research and fascinating to boot.

I'm looking forward to reading the book.

I had the same problem on GTA4. In multiplayer there's a "GTA Race" mode which is racing but with freedom to walk around, use weapons on other racers, etc. There's also a vanilla "race" mode with no weapons that's just about racing.

So I enjoyed playing GTA Race, blocking up the track and mass killing the other racers - you get points and it's the point of that mode - to either dodge violence or to cause it. Instead people whined about how they "just wanted to race" yet for some reason they wouldn't bother to use the proper Race mode.

Basically, people are idiots.

What I don't get is why the game developers did not fix the loopholes in the system.

I am also skeptic of the research motives. "People get angry if you annoy them" - hope it wasn't funded with tax payer money...

They since have. I believe chapter 13 of CoH/V addresses many of these PvP issues.

Fixing all the loopholes is hard. Blizzard didn't want to mess up the game when they made the telekinesis skill in diablo 2, but it turned out to be a big problem. Similarly they didn't want you to be able to PK people with no warning, but various methods of doing that emerged. Now for Diablo 3 they're so worried about people screwing with each other that the game gives everyone separate item drops, but something like that is too big a change to just go back and "fix the loopholes" in diablo 2.

I believe that. Not even sure how long that professors griefing was allowed to continue. It sounds as if he primarily had one trick he used, which should have been fixed after a while.

Or if it can't be fixed "physically", then maybe there should be rules and misbehaving players should be evicted.

I hope they won't fix Diablo 3 so much that it becomes boring.

The irony here comes from the professor simultaneously trying to impose his own social norms on the players he's antagonizing. When someone says something like "if you do that again, I'll kill you" in the context of playing a game, it's ridiculous to interpret it as a bona fide death threat.

Whatever your opinion on griefing is, it can sure be humorous.

This link was in the comments from on NOLA article, "FANSY THE FAMOUS BARD":

http://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm

Professor was suprised that there are two distinct set of rules, game rules and social rules, and that by breaking social rules you can anger people?

Somebody should go to his office and pee on his desk explaining to the professor that he is not breaking any game rules (in that case called 'physics'). Professor could be also suprised by revelation that in real world also two distinct set of rules exist. Maybe he could write about this afterwards.

Thank you! This saves me from commenting on the original now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com